GPS is a well established means of navigation for spacecraft, aircraft as well as Earth-based vehicles or persons. Typically, a user receives signals from GPS satellites and uses pseudorange (PR) measurements from data contained in the GPS signals to determine its position, velocity and other parameters. The term “user” refers to the object whose position is computed based on GPS or other ranging signals it receives. If an application requires high accuracy navigation, PR measurements are processed by a Kalman filter rather than by a point solution algorithm. A Kalman filter uses PR measurements and sophisticated propagation models to estimate the user position, velocity and other state vector parameters. Propagation models are designed to compute the state of the user at time N if the state is known at time N−1. They allow the Kalman filter to use the prior knowledge of the user state for computing the current estimate, thus improving the accuracy.
Unfortunately, even though propagation models can be quite accurate, this does not guarantee the accuracy of the propagated state. The propagation model uses the state vector estimate at the previous epoch as an input, and the accuracy of the latter may be a limiting factor. The accuracy of the propagated state is particularly vulnerable to errors in the object velocity estimate. Velocity is estimated indirectly by the Kalman filter due to its correlation with position.
Achieving high accuracy navigation is closely tied to estimating velocity accurately. This creates a circular dependence between position accuracy and the velocity accuracy. In practice, the estimation process is a gradual one, where improvements in accuracy of velocity and position facilitate each other over some time. The entire process is referred to as convergence of the Kalman filter. In a typical case, filter convergence for space applications takes from several hours to a day or even more. This may be a problem, especially after a spacecraft maneuver, when the filter has to re-converge.
There is room from improving the accuracy of GPS navigation processing, both in terms of the navigation solutions that are produced and the convergence time of the Kalman filter computations.